India v England, 2016-17

John Etheridge

Test matches (5): India 4, England 0
One-day internationals (3): India 2, England 1
Twenty20 internationals (3): India 2, England 1

Any optimism England might have had about repeating their win in India four years earlier lasted roughly a week. After a strong performance in the First Test, Alastair Cook's team were systematically duffed up by a side led with passion, animation and ruthlessness by Virat Kohli. A vastly superior India won 4-0, extending their sequence at home to 16 victories in 18 Tests, and their unbeaten run - home and abroad - to 18, a national record. By the end, England's batsmen were regularly tossing away their wickets, unsure how to balance aggression with adhesion on slow turners, not the fizzing, spitting surfaces many had expected. Their spin bowling was alarmingly ineffective, and the glory days of James Anderson's new-ball partnership with Stuart Broad seemed to be drawing to a close.

Above all, Cook's future as captain was clouded in doubt. His cautious tactics, handling of England's bowlers, and submissive body language all came under the microscope. And while the noises from the dressing-room were supportive, Cook himself had much to contemplate: a welcoming atmosphere and good work behind the scenes can prop up a captain for only so long. When he met director of England cricket Andrew Strauss in January for a tour debrief, his leadership was top of the agenda. In February, he announced he was stepping down.

Yet Cook had been partly responsible for the uncertainty. On the eve of the tour, he had admitted in an interview with The Cricketer magazine that he did not know how much longer he would continue as captain, and said he fancied playing for a couple of years as batsman and senior pro. There was nothing unusual about these observations - he had expressed similar sentiments before - but the timing encouraged speculation.

While England's captain often looked tired and careworn, and naturally missed the baby daughter he had left to come on tour when she was only 18 hours old, Kohli was the dominant figure on either side. India had lost their three previous series against England, and he had played in two of them, averaging 20. This was a mission driven partly by revenge, and wholly by ambition. He was everywhere. Whether it was making runs (he averaged 109), urging groundsmen to prepare pitches with less grass, trying to manipulate umpires, niggling the opposition at media conferences or in the middle, or setting sky-high standards of fitness, preparation and fielding, he could rarely be ignored.

Such was his ubiquity that England believed he was something of a protected species. When Kohli gave Ben Stokes an abusive send-off during the Third Test at Mohali, and Stokes responded in kind, it was Stokes who got into trouble with the ICC. Kohli was also sucked into the mint-in-the-mouth ballshining debate after pictures emerged of a Tic Tac rattling around his teeth during the First Test at Rajkot; only newspaper journalists asked him for an explanation. England's sense of injustice reached its peak in Mumbai, where - with India about to seal the series - Ravichandran Ashwin walked alongside Anderson to dispense abuse for a perceived slight on Kohli at the previous evening's press conference, but escaped censure.

Ashwin was hardly less influential than his captain. He and left-armer Ravindra Jadeja shared 54 wickets, and finished the series first and second in the Test rankings - the first Indians to do so since fellow spinners Bishan Bedi and Bhagwat Chandrasekhar in 1974. Ashwin also scored 306 runs, and Jadeja 224; completing a formidable trio was the debutant off-spinner Jayant Yadav, who took nine wickets in three Tests and hit a century in Mumbai.

Ashwin's nous and variations of flight and angle made him a huge threat in the middle three Tests, though his aggregate from the First and Fifth was four for 437. Perhaps most crucially, Jadeja dismissed Cook six times - frequently aiming across the line to deliveries that tended to skid on - and finished with seven for 48 in Chennai. His economy-rate of 2.31 confirmed he was almost unhittable.

The spinners were made even more threatening by India's first home use of the DRS, and their first in any bilateral series since touring Sri Lanka in 2008. Anil Kumble, their coach, had been suspicious of ball-tracking technology as a player, but his opinion changed on a visit to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his role on the ICC cricket committee. A pre-series presentation by the ICC's Geoff Allardice clinched India's acceptance. Despite their lack of DRS experience, they made marginally better use of it than their opponents, succeeding in 11 of their 37 reviews, to England's eight from 32.

A captain is normally only as good as his bowlers and, while Cook had been able to call on Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar during the 2-1 triumph in 2012-13, this time he had to make do with Moeen Ali, Adil Rashid and assorted others. Ali managed just ten wickets at 64. Rashid took 23, but averaged 37, and got worse as the series wore on. He had started by reducing his ratio of long hops and full tosses, prompting optimism about his progress.

But he reverted to his old faults, and ended a near liability. In the Fifth Test at Chennai, where India racked up 759 for seven - their highest score, and the highest against England - Ali and Rashid had combined figures of two for 343, with just two maidens. When wicketkeeper Parthiv Patel criticised England's spinners in Mumbai, he was both mischievous and spot on. Maybe it was no coincidence that the fortunes of Rashid in particular dipped when the former Pakistan off-spinner Saqlain Mushtaq left his position as part-time coach after the Third Test.

Saqlain had been both technical adviser and emotional crutch, and he made it clear he would relish a permanent role. England's slow-bowling department had other problems. When Zafar Ansari was ruled out after the third game because of a back injury, Hampshire's Liam Dawson - to much bemusement - was summoned as his re=placement. Somerset's Jack Leach had been the leading English spinner during the 2016 summer, with 68 first-class wickets at 22, while Dawson had managed 66 in the previous three seasons put together. But, during the Chennai Test, it emerged that Leach had exceeded the permitted 15 degrees of flexion in routine testing at the National Performance Centre in Loughborough, and undergone remedial work with the Lions. At 39, Gareth Batty failed to provide the control, threat or mentoring role England had hoped for. Ansari, his Surrey team-mate, looked out of his depth and may also struggle to play Test cricket again.

There was little or no reverse swing for England's quicker bowlers, who were outperformed by India's. Mohammed Shami and Umesh Yadav were faster and more threatening, and Shami's screamer in Visakhapatnam to bowl Cook - snapping his off stump in two - was the most spectacular ball of the series. England's seamers were rotated and rested: apart from all-rounder Stokes, none played more than three Tests - and none took more than eight wickets. Anderson had worked hard at home to recover from the shoulder injury that interrupted his summer, and arrived in time for the Second Test.

But he was wicketless in two of his three games, and strategically rested at Chennai amid vague talk of "body soreness". Stokes took England's only fivefor in Mohali, and for a while his career batting average exceeded his bowling - the definition of an all-rounder. But, as he tired, his impact faded in both disciplines. England's combined bowling average of 49 was their worst in a series of five or more Tests against anyone other than Australia. They did not help themselves by misreading the conditions, choosing three spinners in Mohali and four seamers in Mumbai, when it should have been the other way round. It meant they often fielded a near-redundant player. As if trying to win in India with ten men wasn't hard enough, the Indians often appeared to have 12, especially once Jayant - a middle-order batsman for his state side - bolstered the tail. Including the two Tests in Bangladesh which preceded this series, Cook had four opening partners (Ben Duckett, Haseeb Hameed, Joe Root and Keaton Jennings), while five men walked out at No. 4 (Gary Ballance, Duckett, Stokes, Ali and Jonny Bairstow). For the last three Tests, Jos Buttler played as a specialist batsman, with some success.

One undoubted highlight was Hameed, who scored 219 runs at 43 before his tour was ended by a broken little finger. Aged just 19, he allied a remarkable unflappability to a technique that could have been cut-and-pasted from a 1950s coaching manual. He stands side-on, feet shoulder-width apart, head still; his balance is perfect, his footwork precise, his demeanour unhurried. The "Baby Boycott" tag had a ring to it, but was palpable nonsense, as a six down the ground off Jadeja at Rajkot proved. He showed bravery, too, shrugging off the fracture to make a half-century from No. 8 at Mohali. As he worked the strike during a last-wicket stand with Anderson, Hameed displayed acumen in a team that were often soft and unthinking.

Right on cue, Anderson allowed himself to be dozily run out. Hameed went home for surgery, but returned for the final two games to be with his family, who had booked in for all seven Asian Tests and had no intention of leaving. They watched Jennings, his replacement, make a century and a golden duck on Test debut at Mumbai. It was a reminder that maybe their batting wasn't the problem: with Cook winning four tosses out of five, their first-innings totals included 537, 400 and 477, yet they still lost those final two Tests by an innings. Nine batsmen averaged 36 or above but, while they recorded just two centuries in the final four Tests (after four in the First), India had Kohli's series-defining 235 at Mumbai, plus K. L. Rahul's 199 and newcomer Karun Nair's unbeaten 303, both at Chennai. The home team went big, scoring 400 in each game, and 1,390 in their final two innings alone.

England never quite matched them. Root made a hundred on the first day of the series, and passed 50 in each Test, but by the end of the series he had converted only three of his last 17 half-centuries. Ali scored two centuries and a fifty, but his modes of dismissal often caused exasperation. Bairstow was consistency personified on both sides of the stumps, but without reaching 90. There also appeared to be a difference in philosophy between Cook and head coach Trevor Bayliss. After England tried to block their way to a draw in the Second Test - Cook and Hameed took 50 overs to put on 75, before all ten wickets tumbled for 83 - Cook insisted "everybody bought into" the tactic. Bayliss seemed to contradict this and, before the Fourth Test, said he would make his views clear to the team: "It will be up to me to play a role in this. It's time I stepped up to the mark. I'll remind the players how we've played well, which is with a nice positive approach." Cook later said he endorsed Bayliss's comments, but the suspicion remained that the coach's doctrine was more aggressive than his captain's.

Some of England's problems were in place even before they arrived. A schedule of seven almost back-to-back Tests left no chance for out-of-form or fringe players to discover touch and confidence. The ECB claimed the itinerary had been agreed by a previous regime, though Strauss, chief executive Tom Harrison and chairman Colin Graves had been in place for 18 months. The likes of Ballance and Steven Finn ran drinks for several weeks with little hope of a game. A mini-holiday was built into the schedule, and most players decamped to Dubai for a few days' R&R before the Mumbai Test. They might have felt refreshed, but the two heaviest defeats of the tour followed.

Ansari, Ballance, Batty and Finn were poor selections - either out of nick, too old, or probably not good enough - while Duckett was brutally exposed by Ashwin. The arrival of Jennings and, to a lesser extent, Dawson, who began with an unbeaten 66, showed that players could be flown in and enjoy success - and suggested some of the passengers should have gone home. In the end, India were so good it would probably have made little difference.

John Stern writes: Home advantage, greater experience and star quality gave India the edge in two compelling white-ball series played in front of packed houses. The recall of Yuvraj Singh to their one-day squad after an absence of three years gave Kohli, the new limited-overs captain, a brains trust that, along with M. S. Dhoni, had more than 900 limited-overs internationals between the three of them. All hit hundreds, and took part in double-century stands that sealed the run-splattered 50-over series with a game to spare. In all, 2,090 were scored, making it the highest-scoring three-match series in ODI history. England's victories in the final one-dayer, at Kolkata, and the first Twenty20 game, at Kanpur, came on pitches with pace and bounce. On slower surfaces elsewhere, their attack were mainly one-dimensional. Death bowling remained a mostly unmastered skill, with the exception of Chris Woakes, who demonstrated bottle at Eden Gardens. The introduction for the Twenty20 games of Tymal Mills and Chris Jordan, who both showed off their variations, sharpened England up.

That series was marred by an old-fashioned umpiring row. The performance of Chettithody Shamshuddin in the second match prompted England to make an official complaint to match referee Andy Pycroft. Shamshuddin, who had been a late appointment, and was flown in from Australia less than 24 hours before, then asked to stand down from his on-field duties only hours before the final T20. Both the captain, Eoin Morgan, and Root called for DRS to be introduced for 20-over internationals. Six days later, the ICC proposed exactly that. Having chosen to miss the one-day tour of Bangladesh in October, Morgan was under pressure, but his brilliant century in the second ODI at Cuttack, even in a losing cause, had the stamp of class. He finished with his reputation as leader and batsman intact, despite England's tired collapse of eight wickets for eight runs in the final T20 at Bangalore.

Match reports for

1st Test: India v England at Rajkot, Nov 9-13, 2016
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2nd Test: India v England at Visakhapatnam, Nov 17-21, 2016
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3rd Test: India v England at Mohali, Nov 26-29, 2016
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4th Test: India v England at Wankhede, Dec 8-12, 2016
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5th Test: India v England at Chennai, Dec 16-20, 2016
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Tour Match: India A v England XI at Brabourne, Jan 10, 2017
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Tour Match: India A v England XI at Brabourne, Jan 12, 2017
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1st ODI: India v England at Pune, Jan 15, 2017
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2nd ODI: India v England at Cuttack, Jan 19, 2017
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3rd ODI: India v England at Eden Gardens, Jan 22, 2017
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1st T20I: India v England at Kanpur, Jan 26, 2017
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